Mimsy Were the Borogoves

As it turns out, when this was posted he’d already sent that email a few days earlier.

I have to admit to being somewhat surprised by the backlash against government employees being requested to list five accomplishments from their past week. A recent example is a meme demanding that:

Elon needs to send an email to all Americans explaining why the rocket failed If he cannot do that by tomorrow morning, he should consider himself fired.

At the time this was posted, Musk had already sent this email. You could easily run a search on “why did the Space X rocket fail?” and get back several news stories each with the same quotes from Space X. It very clearly had been sent through the various public relations services that generate, among other things, emails to journalists for delivering news to the American people.

And, I’d add, learning the reasons the rocket failed were accomplishments. Were Space X subject to this rule (which it may well be), that launch easily resulted in five accomplishments on its own for every employee involved.

The response was that “a list isn’t the whole picture” and “I… would struggle to list five things because that’s how jobs are sometimes.”

I used to work at a private university. Due to both weird funding mechanisms and just the kind of people who get into management even at private colleges, higher education employment is a very weird amalgam of private business and government work. Our combination of information silos, funding silos, dysfunctional management, and a complete ignorance of customers was very reminiscent of Mike Judge’s^• wonderful Office Space^•.

Including the paperwork involved. I have very little sympathy with people who are unwilling to list five things accomplished in the last week in a simple email. While I’ve never quite had to deal with TPS report cover sheets I would have jumped at the chance to replace our six-page job evaluations with “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week”.

What in the world are they teaching in schools? Peace isn’t a deal? Their playground fights must be epic. Do teachers give weapons to the underdog to keep the fight going?

I still don’t understand the “peace is not a deal” talking point. How in the world is peace achieved if it isn’t negotiated? Without negotiations, how can there be peace? War seems to be the only other option. And in fact, the slogan has been updated now that the Left wants war: it is now foreign policy that isn’t a deal.

When did the term “foreign policy” and the concept of doing the right thing change into “doing a deal”?

This is so alien I clearly must be missing something. If peace is not a deal, if foreign policy is not a deal, where do negotiations about peace take place? There doesn’t seem to be room for much except endless war.

Doing the right thing is always a compromise that requires negotiations. Doing what you think is the right thing without negotiating with the recipients of your largess is dangerously close to war. Foreign policy has always been about making deals. That’s literally what it is. Ending the Korean war was a deal. Nixon going to China was a deal. The SALT treaties were deals. Obama sending aid to Iran was a deal.

The entire history of our policy in the Middle East has been a long series of deals. One of the most famous quotes about the Middle East is the apocryphal “We must deal with our enemies, because it is our enemies with whom we make peace.” It remains popular despite its lack of provenance because it embodies real truths about both peace and foreign policy: at its best, it involves deals with enemies as well as allies.

The formulation of foreign policy is the result of negotiations within the United States among parties with different interests. Implementing effective foreign policy is the result of negotiations with foreign powers, allies and enemies. It is, literally, the making of deals between multiple parties.

I know I just did a pecan pie two weeks ago for Texas Independence Day. But you can never have too much pecan pie, and Friday is Pi Day. Why not extend it to 3.1416 and make it a Pie Weekend from Friday the 14th to Sunday the 16th?

It may take that long to finish this year’s pie.

Wheat for Man’s whole wheat crust was also great with banana pie.

A wonderful crunchy top, honey-flavored gooey insides. A great pie.

A dollop of ginger cream cheese was pretty good on this pie, too.

Both the pie and the crust come from people with a deep partiality to specific ingredients. The pie shell is from Dora D. Flack, Mabel H. Miller, and Vernice G. Rosenvall’s Wheat for Man. This otherwise standard whole wheat shell adds both an egg and vinegar to the ingredients. Replacing some of the water with a bit of vinegar is always a great idea when making pie crusts—at least as long as there are no competing flavors such as orange juice, or 2023’s beer.

From the Agnus Dei I’ve chosen to move to the Mysterium Fidei.

Unlike the Agnus Dei, the Mysterium Fidei is not a linear translation to English. Here’s the Latin:

Priest: Mysterium fidei!

Congregation: Mortem tuam annuntiamus, Domine, et tuam Resurrectionem confitemur, donec venias.

Or, as we say it in English:

Priest: The mystery of faith!

Congregation: We proclaim your Death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection, until you come again.

One of the unique and very misleading things about the Agnus Dei is how little it resembles modern English. There are only two words that even remotely resemble their English counterparts. Dei is likely the root of deity, but to be honest I’m not sure how common that word is outside of fantasy role-playing, and old-school fantasy gaming at that. Peccatorum is obviously related in some way to peccadillos in a slightly watered-down way¹ but I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word peccadillos spoken out loud. I’ve only seen it in books, and then rarely.

The Mysterium Fidei, on the other hand, is filled with words that look maddeningly familiar, even if you discount the word mortem which is mainly familiar because our justice system uses Latin extensively. Mysterium. Fidei. Annuntiamus. Domine. Resurrectionem. Confitemur. And for the most part, what they look like is what they are, vaguely. Annuntiamus is announce—or proclaim. Resurrectionem is in fact resurrection. Confitemur… well, that’s a little different. But if you squint you can see it.

So let’s take it phrase by phrase:

Sunday is Texas Independence Day. Over the last decade I’ve managed to acquire several vintage Texas community cookbooks as well as several other Texas-related cookbooks from businesses such as the Imperial Sugar Company.

It’s possible that I’m overcompensating for having moved here from Michigan by way of California.

I’ve decided to start featuring these cookbooks, or at least their better recipes, for Texas Independence Day. March in Central Texas is a good time for celebrating outdoors—usually. Unless there’s a polar vortex rolling through, it’s cool but not cold, and neither dry nor humid.

One of the cookbooks I would have liked to feature earlier is the 1975 Potter County Home Demonstration Council Bicentennial Cook Book, published to coincide with the American Bicentennial. I acquired this cookbook too late for it to go into my Sestercentennial series’ inaugural entry, A Bicentennial Meal for the Sestercentennial, and that’s too bad, because it’s a very nice book. Lily Ward’s Potato Chip Cookies were the best of the three potato chip cookies I featured in last year’s National Potato Day cookie post. They were so good, I included them among the three treats I mailed out to friends over Christmas.

Mrs. C.D. Baldwin’s Hawaiian Fudge is also the inspiration for my own Les Johnson’s Antimatter Creams. It would never have occurred to me that you could heat fresh banana to 240° without harming it if I hadn’t made her pineapple fudge. Both pineapple and banana are great additions to a nut fudge. The added green food coloring, however, was only really appropriate for the radioactive variant.

“How To Enjoy Greater Satisfaction From Your Refrigerator”

Like Montgomery Ward’s 1942 Cold Cooking, the Borg-Warner Corporation’s 1947 Norge Cold Cookery and Recipe Digest (PDF File, 10.2 MB) is marketed towards owners and potential owners of the company’s refrigerator. It’s not just a manual, but a cookbook full of reasons to use the product. While Borg-Warner was headquartered in Detroit, the Norge plant, according to this book, was across the state in Muskegon. Borg-Warner still exists; Norge long since hasn’t, although they seem to have continued in some form, probably in-name-only, up to 2006.

This is the third in a series about the first decades of the home refrigeration revolution. While I won’t be going past 1947 I will fill in some of the gaps between 1928 and 1947 with at least two more posts over the coming year. Here’s the series so far:

The first part of Cold Cookery extols the wonders of the Norge “Rollator” refrigerator. It describes how to maintain the appliance and outlines how to use it: which shelves to store which kinds of food on, how to adjust the dial for freezing times, that sort of thing. The freezer section of this 1947 refrigerator was still tiny, though it did have a separate set of freezer shelves for ice cubes and frozen desserts in addition to the main freezer box.

It’s interesting what foods they considered important enough to mention. There’s a “double-width” storage space especially for “long stalk celery” and “rhubarb”. Rhubarb is one of my favorite hard-to-find items nowadays.

Translation: “Keep an eye on parked cars, and use your bell to be noticed.” This should not be controversial, although I might quibble with the bell.

I’ve been reading Il Post lately, both to improve my very bad Italian and to gain a non-American, non-English perspective on the news of the day. Yet somehow I missed this article about a “scandal” in Lombardy until a friend brought it to my attention with the comment “This is funny.”

It is funny, and a very good example of why I avoid social media. In a virtual environment we lose any sense of reality. In this case, it appears that a local government was actually doing something substantive to keep pedestrians and bicyclists from being killed by inattentive drivers. It turned into a social media scandal because… it told people how to effectively stay alive rather than laying blame and letting them die!

I’m not going to translate the whole thing. It’s not worth the trouble and in any case my Italian is not up to the task. The title is The questionable campaign on street safety in Lombardy. The subtitle is:

È stata sospesa dopo molte critiche a un post che dava consigli ai pedoni per evitare di farsi investire, dando un po' l'impressione di colpevolizzarli

That is, in my rough Italian:

It [the safety program] was suspended after much criticism to a post that advised pedestrians on how to avoid getting hit, giving a bit of an impression of blaming them.

The thing is, that bit of blame is no more than saying that some pedestrians don’t pay attention to the possibility of dangerous drivers when using the street. I do a lot of walking when I travel, and this is demonstrably true. Judging from the campaign’s graphics, the campaign was not about assigning blame but about saving lives.

This is the semi-birthday of Dungeons & Dragons, to the extent that we can even know when the birthday was. It’s over fifty years old now, and we have already lost many of the pioneers of the game. Every year that goes by, we lose more pioneers and more players. With them go what in business we’d call the “institutional knowledge” they carried. That knowledge isn’t just about rules and rulesets, but about why these rules and rulesets were created. It’s not about a particular game but about the whole milieu in which the game was created.

I wrote about how the way that fans and readers interacted influenced early games in On a Cult of Gygax. But just as important is how and why the entrepreneurs did what they did. Take the best of today’s creators, your-favorite-osr-creator-here, and even if they never created their product they’d still be able to game. They could still play Dungeons & Dragons, or Traveller, or Tunnels & Trolls, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or Villains & Vigilantes… the list goes on, and what each of those games have in common is that if their creators had never created those games, their creators would never have been able to play.

Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, Mark Millar, and even Ken St. Andre, were creating games not to market them but because they couldn’t play that kind of game without creating the game first. They were players before they were businessmen—and it showed in everything from how they marketed the game (marketing often came after playing) and in how they talked about the game.

It’s very strange to me, having grown up soaking in the free-form rules style of AD&D play, how attached some players are to a Cult of the Cult of Gygax™; and to complaining about a supposed hardline by TSR against house rules. My memory of that period, at least through the late eighties, is one of “make it your own”, advice straight from the rule books and from outlets such as The Dragon.

We always knew that Gygax and other TSR luminaries used different rules. And it made sense for them to do so even outside of a “make it your own” mentality: where could we expect new rules to come from, if not from the campaigns of the author and other employees at TSR? We assumed, and it appears to be true, that the people at TSR were gamers, that they played the game, too.

Which makes questions and answers like this one from Polyhedron far more understandable to me than to adherents of the Cult of the Cult of Gygax™.